human goodness which holy men of old had never succeeded in bringing down into the flesh, beyond a blurred blocking in of the heavenly ideal.  He lived man’s dream of goodness so gloriously that he became a more than man, in whom was felt the coming nigh of the Eternal Holy One.  The human form divine, to which mankind aspired, took on its true and awful splendor, as the image of the God whom the conscience worshipped.  Every passing “I would be,” of the saints of old looked forth, transfigured from the face of One who said “I AM.”

True to Israel’s ancient dream, around this righteous suffering servant of the Eternal, the nations gathered, to be taught of God.  The souls to whom He gave power to become the sons of God became the family of the Heavenly Father, in which there was “neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ was all and in all.”  In this holy brotherhood of the children of the All-Father, we moderns take our places round our elder brother; feeling sure that we have found the spiritual band or religion wherein society is to be held together, through each man’s holding hard by the God who is the perfection of His own highest dreams.

* * * * *

Such then being the fact of Israel’s historic travail and such her issue, our fathers’ sense of the supreme significance of Christ in human history takes on a new light in our new knowledge.

The problem of religion is to find such a knowledge of the Being in whom we live and move and have our being, as shall lead men’s awe before this mysterious Power up into an awe of a Power whom we may rightly worship, trust and love.  To find the key to this problem is to hold the secret of all the puzzles of our weary world.  Before the Power “manifest in the flesh” in Jesus Christ, our souls hush, in an awe which breathes within us worship, trust and love.  And if this Power be the very Power felt in history and in nature, whose ways therein are so often baffling to the moral sense, then all is well.  But, if this be so, the holy Power who is shrined in Christ must show the features of the Mind which tabernacles in nature.  There can be no contradiction.  Unquestionably an essential characteristic of the Mind in nature is the method of its action.  There is a reign of Law.  The highest generalization of the methods of this law which man has reached reveals this Power as acting, through every sphere, in continuous progressive development.  One word embodies this supreme generalization—­evolution.  Christianity must fit into this universal order.  Otherwise it either denies that order, which denial cannot be received; or it is denied by that order, which denial is very certain to be increasingly received.  God “cannot deny Himself!” “I change not.”

Here is where Christianity’s hold of the human mind hinges in our age.  The old reading of the history of the preparation for Christ separated “those whom God hath joined together.”  The new reading of that preparation restores the needful unity.